Commentary on Political Economy

Wednesday, 20 June 2012

The Philosophy of the Flesh (Continued) - Arendt's Critique of Kant

Reality in a world of appearances is first
of all characterized by ‘standing still and remaining’the same long enough to
become an object for acknowledgement
and recognition by a subject.
Husserl’s basic and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the
intentionality of all acts of consciousness…” (LotM, p46).

As we have seen, Arendt’s critique
of the Cartesian cogito moves correctly from the observation that “thinking”
shows merely that “there are thoughts” (p49). But from this conclusion Arendt
does not, unlike Nietzsche (again, p49), proceed as she must to question the
entire notion of a “subject”, of a “thinking ego”, and therefore also of
Husserl’s “transcendental ego” and its “intentionality”. For what can it mean
to say that “reality is charcterised by standing still and remaining the same
long enough to become and ‘object’ for a ‘subject’”? No matter how hard it may
try, thought will never be able “to stand
still and remain the same long enough” (!) to be able to identify an
“object” and a “subject”, but only “to perceive or intuit” that there is a
“thereness”, an ever-present or present-ment (pressentiment or “sixth sense” or Aquinas’s sensus communis) of “reality”. This is so for the devastatingly
simple reason that all that thought can ever be conscious or aware of is the “pre-sent”, which is neither “the
past”, because even “memories” are “present”, nor quite evidently “the future”
– which is a “present pro-jection”. Instead, Arendt stops at the conclusion
that “thinking” con-firms the existence of a “reality”, of a “world” from which
even the most “meditative” or abstract thought can “withdraw” and yet one that
it can never quite “leave”. Presumably, one ought to infer from this “withdrawing
without leaving” that Arendt has relinquished the notion of the “transcendence”
of thought – but in fact she has not, as she herself demonstrates with the
following observation:

Whatever
thinking can reach and whatever it may achieve, it is precisely reality as
given to common sense, in its sheer thereness, that remains forever beyond its
grasp….Thought processes, unlike common sense, can be physically located in
the brain, but nevertheless transcend
all biological data, be they functional or morphological…(LotM, pp51-2).

Yet again, in her preoccupation
or haste to offer “thinking” a privileged place in ontology, Arendt forgets
that “common sense” and “thinking” are one and the same thing, that they are
located neither “in the brain” nor in any other “organ” (cf. Arendt’s objection
to the earlyWittgensteinian notion of “language is part of our organism” at p52)
as every philosopher from Hegel to Merleau-Ponty (in ‘Signes’ or the ‘Reader’)
– whom Arendt expressly acknowledges and agrees with contra Kant (pp48-9) – would tell her. On this specific point, Arendt
misconstrues Merleau-Ponty’s charge against Descartes of seeking to distill and
then isolate thought from perception for
the simple reason that for Merleau-Ponty perception and thought – just like
perception and language – cannot be separated as Arendt attempts to do here by
“elevating” thought (though strangely not language) to a higher
“transcendental” level from (mere?) “biological data be they functional or
morphological”!

The reason why Arendt is so
persistent, even obdurate, in this “transcendental attitude” is that she
thoroughly misconceives the entire “nature” or “ontological status” of abstract
thought – that is, of thought that pretends or presumes “to ab-stract from” and
therefore to transcend the world, as Descartes’s “meditations” or Husserl’s
“epoche” (suspension) were meant to do, albeit in different ways.

Kant’s
famous distinction between Vernunft
and Verstand, between a faculty of
speculative thought and the ability to know arising out of sense experience,….
has consequences more far-reaching….than he himself recognized….Although he
insisted on the inability of reason to arrive at knowledge, especially with
respect to God, Freedom, and Immortality – to him the highest objects of thought
– he could not part altogether with the conviction that the final aim of
thinking, as of knowledge, is truth and cognition; he thus uses, throughout the
Critiques, the term Vernunftererkenntnis,
‘knowledge arising out of pure reason’, a construction that ought to have been
a contradiction in terms for him, (LotM, pp62-3).

Reprising Heidegger’s (and even
earlier, Nietzsche’s) critique of the exhaustion of Western philosophy in the
erroneous identification of “truth” with “certainty” or “cognition” or “knowledge”,
Arendt demonstrates incontrovertibly just how little she has grasped the real
problematic of Western philosophy and of the Kantial critique in particular.
Arendt cannot understand that if indeed Kant had chosen to con-fine pure reason
to the sphere of “sheer activity”, that is to say of pure thought, of pure
concepts (Croce), he would then have had to concede the “sheer conventionality”
of pure reason and its “abstract thought” – its naked “instrumentality” and
cognitive “emptiness” (intuition without concepts is blind; concepts without
intuition are empty”). Arendt seeks here to elide and elude and avoid the
entire problem of the “ordo et connexio
rerum idearumque”! A pure reason that remains “sheer activity”, “abstract
thought” with no “empirical” nexus to
reality, perception and intuition – such a pure reason would end up being a
mere “ghost” and, in its “formal logico-mathematical” aspect, a welter of
total, complete and abject tautologies. Arendt herself intelligently identifies
this Kantian quandary when she quotes him writing that

“[for
the sake of mere speculative reason alone] we should hardly have undertaken the
labor of transcendental investigations….since whatever discoveries might be
made in regard to these matters, we should not be able to make use of them in
any helpful manner in concreto”
(p65).

The problem for Kant as for all Western
philosophy has been always, and quite justifiably, to discover the “nexus
rerum”, “the purposive unity of
things”, the “link” between “objective reality” and “subjective knowledge” of
that reality. To negate or deny that such a link ec-sists means effectively
that one must then either discard the “content” of abstract thought or else to
jettison the “scientificity” of all knowledge! Arendt has simply failed to
comprehend this crucial predicament that has been the bane of Western
metaphysics and science. Instead, she curiously and naively believes that Kant
could easily have abandoned the “confusion” involved in reconciling thought and
experience.

But
Kant does not insist on this side of the matter [the irrelevance of reason to
cognition and knowledge], because he is afraid that his ideas might then turn
out to be ‘empty thought-things’ (leere
Gedankendinge)… It is perhaps for the same reason that he equates what we
have here called meaning with Purpose and even Intention (Zweck and Absicht): The
“highest formal unity which rests solely on concepts of reason, is the purposive unity of things. The speculative interest of reason makes it necessary
to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the
[intention] of a supreme reason”, (LotM, pp64-5).

Right
in the midst of the passages quoted above occurs the sentence that stands in
the greatest possible contrast to his own equation of reason with Purpose:
“Pure reason is in fact occupied with nothing but itself. It can have no other
vocation, (LotM, p65).

What Arendt fails to understand
is something that Kant knew all too well, and that is that unless the “truths”
of pure reason” can be intimately “con-nected” to the regularities found in
nature, then they can lay no claim to “truth” at all – and, worst of all,
neither can the “scientific truths” that Arendt espouses, because there would
then be “nothing at all” in those “empirical regularities” that could lend them
the status of “scientific truths”. Science would then be exposed for what it
is: - sheer “instrumentality”. Arendt is aware of this difficulty, which is
why, on one hand, she attempts to preserve the word “truth” for scientific
discoveries of a “finite” and “paradigmatic” (she cites Kuhn) nature; whilst on
the other hand she seeks to avoid the word “truth”, preferring “meaning”, for
the “sheer activity” of abstract thought, preserving thus its “formal” and
“non-purposive” quality. Weber does the same with his Zweck-rationalitat, which
is in fact “non-purposive” in the sense that it is “instrumental” and not
“teleological”, and yet Weber, unlike Arendt, intelligently and perspicaciously
acknowledges the “technical-purposive”
instrumentality of this “instrumental reason” without dignifying it with a
patina of “spirituality” or transcendence as Arendt does!

Thinking,
no doubt, plays an enormous role in any scientific enterprise, but it is the
role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is
worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific, (LotM, p54).

This is pure Weber: but whereas
Weber perceives that thinking is pure instrumentality, “a means to an end”, it
is Zweck-rationalitat rather than Wert-rationalitat, Arendt steadfastly
refuses the “purposivity” of this notion of “thinking” or “reason”, clinging
instead to a romantic notion of “meaning”. Weber sees the “purpose” in “reason”
and leaves it at that, at its “technicality” which he confuses with “scientificity”
rather than “instrumentality”. Arendt instead is looking for “something more”
in “thinking” – wishing to rescue it from, and to give it a “content” or
“transcendence” over and above its, (sterile) “purity”. So here is the crux:
what can it mean for Arendt, more than for Kant who obviously was ambivalent
about the idea, to say with Kant that “pure
reason is occupied with nothing but itself and can have no other vocation”?
Arendt obviously seeks simultaneously to preserve the “purity” (non-instrumentality
and non-purposiveness) of “reason”, and to avoid the “sterility” of such
“neutrality” – its tautologous quality – by emphasizing its “meaningfulness”,
and finally to redeem the “spiritual” side of thinking – not its “faith”, pace Kant, but its “meaning-fulness”.

[Kant]
never became fully aware of having liberated reason and thinking, of having
justified this faculty and its activity even though they could not boast of any
‘positive’ results. As we have seen, he stated that he had “found it necessary
to deny knowledge… to make room for faith”, but all he had “denied” was
knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but
for thought , (LotM, p63).

Yet whilst Arendt resists every
notion that “thinking” is confined to its “content” – whether as reason or
intellect -, at the same time she intuits that if the ontological status of thinking is defined by “thinking the
unknowable”, such a “spiritual” notion will reduce both the ontological status
of thinking and its content or subject-matter to abstract, ghostly-ghastly
sterility and insubstantiality as well as irrelevancy: - which is quite
precisely why Kant had said that by rescuing “reason” for cognition he had also
rescued “faith”, that is, what lies “beyond” the “materiality” or
“instrumentality” or “purposivity” of thinking that is “necessarily required”
by “the unity of things”, the nexus or
connexio between cognition and world! Arendt is still shackled to the
notion that “thinking” transcends the
world even though she seeks to avoid the idealistic implications of this
position by redefining thought as “withdrawing from the world without ever
leaving it”! What Arendt has failed to do is to fulfill the original goal
of her reflections on “the life of the mind” – that “philosophy of the flesh”
that, as was Merleau-Ponty’s great intuition, does not distinguish between thinking and its content, perception and
its “object”, thought and the senses, thought and language, and treats them
instead as immanently connected.

Here is Arendt again emphasizing
the “gap” between thinking and cognition or certainty or “truth”:

There
are no truths beyond and above factual truths: all scientific truths are
factual truths…and only factual statements are scientifically
verifiable….Knowing certainly aims at truth, even if this truth, as in the
sciences, is never an abiding truth but a provisional verity that we expect to
exchange against other, more accurate verities as knowledge progresses. To
expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think
with the urge to know….In this sense, reason is the a priori condition of the
intellect and of cognition; it is because reason and intellect are so
connected….that the philosophers have always been tempted to accept the
criterion of truth – so valid for science and everyday life – as applicable to
their own extraordinary business as well, (LotM, pp61-2).

The difficulty is evident: the
only “test” for “verities” is “truth”; if we renounce the notion of “truth” we
are left not with “verities”, but with nothing at all except either
“con-venience” or “con-vention”, which are the nemesis of “scientific endeavor”
(cf. Mach, ‘EuI’). Furthermore, the “criterion of truth and error” is in fact
just as applicable to “thinking” as it is to factual truths: contrary to what
Arendt thinks, the opposite of factual truth can be “error” and not just “the
deliberate lie” (p59) – because factual truth can be as aleatory or
“falsifiable” as factual untruth! The terrifying reality is that Arendt has
abolished the notion of “truth”, much as Nietzsche and Weber did, without being
able to replace it with a “meaningful” one of “thinking”. When she does attempt
to infuse “thinking” with “meaning”, the result is as revealing as it is
fallimentary and fallacious.